pennyspoetryfandomcom-20200214-history
Margaret Danner
Margaret Esse Danner (1915-1984) (also Margaret Danner Cunningham) was an African-American poet, editor, and cultural activist known for her poetic imagery and her celebration of African heritage and cultural forms. Life Youth and education Born in 1915, Margaret Esse Danner came of age in Chicago during the Great Migration. Sources place Danner’s birth in Pryorsburg, Kentucky, in 1915, although she adamantly claimed Chicago as her birthplace.Margaret Danner, letter to Langston Hughes, Oct. 19, 1966, Langston Hughes Papers, Box 51, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. In 8th grade, she won 1st prize in a school contest for “The Violin,” a poem describing Stradivarius and Guarnerius violins. Danner’s college education included courses at Loyola University, Northwestern University, YMCA College, and the newly founded Roosevelt College.“Guide to the Margaret Danner Papers 1940-1984,” University of Chicago Library 2009 < http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.DANNERM&q=Poetry>. Accessed 11 Dec 2011. Chicago years Perhaps equally significant was her education in the African American cultural community of Chicago’s South Side, which in the 1930s and 1940s harbored grassroots cultural institutions and informal circles devoted to politics, education, art and literature and often tied to the Communist Popular Front.James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) 183. Although Danner stayed detached from Communism and would eventually oppose all radical politics, she participated in various South Side groups, including Inez Cunningham Stark’s poetry workshop at the South Side Community Art Center along with Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Goss Burroughs, her “sometime friends (and rivals).” Smethurst, Black Arts Movement 205. In 1946, Danner founded Art Associates to gather and promote Chicago’s black writers and poets. She counted as friends the poet and critic Edward Bland as well as Hoyt Fuller, who would head the revived Negro Digest (later Black World) beginning in 1951. Danner attracted mentors outside the South Side, including poets Paul Eagle and Karl Shapiro.“Guide to the Margaret Danner Papers.” She also struck up a correspondence with Langston Hughes that would continue until his death.Margaret Danner, letters to Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes Papers, Box 51, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. In 1945, she wrote to Hughes: “My life as a poet looks very bleak to me now…. Only last night I read one of mine and was told it was elusive, ethereal etc. Not much help for my people in that sort of verse.” Letter to Hughes, 20 June 1945. She aimed “to inject some strength” into her work and to train her naturally delicate style to carry forceful messages of African American pride and racial equality, what she called “the social conscious.” Letter to Hughes, 1 June 1949; Langston Hughes and Margaret Danner, Writers of the Revolution, sound recording on LP, Black Forum, 1970. Poems such as “Etta Moten’s Attic” and “Africa, Drifting Through Me Sings” demonstrate Danner's growing passion for black African arts, cultures and peoples in the 1940s and 1950s. She looked to National Geographic magazines, anthropology books and American museums for information and images.June Aldridge, “Benin to Beale Street: African Art in the Poetry of Margaret Danner,” CLA Journal 2 (December 31, 1987): 203. Professing “the power of the African pull to be stronger than Western Civilization in my psyche,” Ibid. Danner framed many of her poems around encounters with African art objects. She wrote in 1968, “I believe (and have tried for many years to do something positive about this conviction) that the Black should be awakened to his vast beauty.” Margaret Danner, interview in “Writers Symposium,” Negro Digest 17.3 (January 1968): 19. Danner joined the staff of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse as an editorial assistant in 1951 and in 1956 became the first African American to serve as a Poetry assistant editor. “Far From Africa: Four Poems,” which would become one of Danner’s most anthologized works, appeared in Poetry in 1951 and earned her a John Hay Whitney fellowship for a trip to Africa, which she delayed until 1966. June M. Aldridge notes that Danner “recalled the association with Poetry as one of the most rewarding experiences of her life.” June M. Aldridge, “Margaret Esse Danner,” Dictionary of Literary Biography v. 41: Afro-American poets since 1955, eds. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1985), 85. However, by the late 1950s, according to James Edward Smethurst, “Danner’s career as a poet seemed to her stalled… perhaps in part due to her proclivity for intense emotional and intellectual crushes on individuals and near-paranoid fears of plots against her career.” Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, 205. Details of Danner’s personal life are scarce. She first married Cordell Strickland, with whom she had one child, Naomi. Danner later remarried to Otto Cunningham.Aldridge, 85. Detroit years and Boone House Danner moved to Detroit in 1959 to join that city’s vibrant community of black writers and artists. She quickly became a part of the “Detroit Group,” which included writers such as Danner, Dudley Randall, Oliver LaGrone, Woodie King, Jr., James Thompson and Naomi Long Madgett. In 1962, Danner was named a poet-in-residence at Wayne State University.Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement 200. That same year, Danner talked a local Baptist pastor into lending her an empty parish house to found a cultural center for black writers, artists and musicians. Boone House became the artistic home of the Detroit group from 1962 to 1964 and hosted visitors such as Robert Hayden, Owen Dodson, Fuller and Hughes, who provided crucial support and publicity for several Boone House writers.James E. Smethurst and Howard Rambsby II, “Reform and revolution, 1965-1976: the Black Aesthetic at work,” The Cambridge History of African American Literature, eds. Maryemma Graham and Jerry Washington Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 436; Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement 205. The Boone House group also benefited from the attention of Rosey Pool, who included Danner and four other Detroit writers in her 1962 anthology Beyond the Blues.Melba Joyce Boyd, Wrestling with the muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) 109; Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement 207. Madgett remembered Boone House as an “old house that was beautiful in its details but in poor repair. It lacked central heat, some of the lights did not work, and the toilet lacked a seat, but we were glad to have this meeting place and to huddle together good-naturedly in front of the fireplace in cold weather.” Boyd 105. According to Randall, “At the Boone House poetry meetings we didn’t criticize each other’s work. It wasn’t a workshop. Instead, we created a poetry community to inspire each other.” At Boone House, Danner and Randall collaborated on Poem Counterpoem (1966)—the first book out of Randall’s Broadside Press, an important independent black publisher still in operation today.“Reform and Revolution” 413; http://www.broadsidepress.org, accessed 12 Dec. 2011. It was possibly during her time in Detroit that Danner joined the Baha’i faith, which she shared with Robert Hayden. From 1964 to 1966, she was a touring poet sponsored by the Baha’i Teaching Committee. Later career In 1966, Danner took her long-desired trip to Africa through the John Hay Whitney Fellowship to join prominent African American cultural figures at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal.“Writers Seen on the Festival Scene,” Negro Digest 15.8 (June 1966): 50. The poem “At Home in Dakar” (also published as “At Home in Africa”) recalls this trip. Danner’s enthusiasm for the Black Arts Movement emerging in the mid-1960s apparently “blew hot and cold.” Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement 333. Still, she participated in conferences and readings with younger poets and generally supporting the new literary generation.Aldridge, “Benin to Beale Street” 86. As Negro Digest acknowledged in 1968, Danner’s “poetry long had reflected the now-fashionable ‘black is beautiful’ philosophy.” “OBAC—A Year Later,” Negro Digest 17.9 (July 1968): 92. During terms as poet-in-residence at Virginia Union University in Richmond and LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, both historically black institutions, Danner continued her lifelong dedication to young people and edited 2 anthologies of students’ verse.Erlene Stetson, “Dialectic Voices in the Poetry of Margaret Esse Danner,” in Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, ed. R. Baxter Miller (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986) 102. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Danner published her 3rd and 4th volumes of poetry, Iron Lace (1968) and The Down of a Thistle: Selected Poems, Prose Poems, and Songs(1976). Her work continued to draw upon African (as well as Western) art, flora and fauna, relationships with her fellow poets and scenes from urban life. Several of her poems address or discuss her grandson, Sterling Washington, Jr., whom she calls “Muffin,” and who seems to represent an African-American future. Margaret Esse Danner died on January 1, 1984 in Chicago. Her papers are held by the University of Chicago library. Writing Erlene Stetson: “A word conjuror and artisan, she provides her reader with well-crafted ‘word sketches’ that are impressionistic and expressionistic. Her poetry, the result of a dialectic between voices of her past, present, and future, reveals her role and relation to a tradition of Western poetics; her artistic invention of poetry as a visual impression combines graphic social criticism and visual creation, that which is both didactic and mimetic, into an exciting synthesis of a new aesthetic; her verse makes her reader a viewer of art (synesthetic imagery) as well.”Stetson, “Dialectic Voices in the Poetry of Margaret Esse Danner”, 93. Samuel A. Allen: “One can perceive between the two covers of this one crafted volume, in its full imaginative scope, the web of intricate and brilliant imagery her pen has spun forth in the journey of a sensitive, independent and compassionate spirit across these turbulent times in this uncertain place.”Samuel A. Allen, introduction to The Down of a Thistle (Waukesha: Country Beautiful, 1976). Publications Poetry * Impressions of African Art Forms. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1960. * To Flower: Poems. Hemphill Press, 1963. *''Poem, Counterpoem'' (with Dudley Randall). Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1966?, 1969. * Not Light, Nor Bright, Nor Feathery. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1968. * Iron Lace. Millbrook, NY: Kriya Press, 1968. *''The Down of a Thistle: Selected poems, prose Poems, and Songs''. Waukesha, WI: Country Beautiful, 1976. Edited *''Brass Horses''. Richmond, VA: Virginia Union University, 1968. *''Regroup'', Richmond, VA: Virginia Union University, 1969.Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (edited by Stephen C. Tracy). University of Illinois Press, 2012, p.159. Google Books, Web, June 24, 2014. Anthologized *''New Negro Poets, U.S.A.'' (edited by Langston Hughes). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964. *''Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro poets'' (edited by Robert Hayden). New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1967. *''The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970'' (edited by Langston Hughes & Arna Bontemps). Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. *''A Broadside Treasury'' (edited by Gwendolyn Brooks). Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1971. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Margaret Danner, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, June 24, 2014. Audio / video Recordings * Writers of the Revolution (with Langston Hughes). Black Forum **also released as Poets of the Revolution. Motown Records. See also * List of U.S. poets References External links * Margaret Danner 1915-1984 at the Poetry Foundation ;Books *Margaret Danner at Amazon.com ;About * Margaret Esse Danner in the Oxford Companion to African-American Literature *"Afrakans in Amuraka: Black History Month Profile - Margaret Danner" at The Lounge * From Kentucky to the World, Margaret Danner at AA Registry. * Danner, Margaret E. (1915-1984) at The Black Past Remembered. Category:African American poets Category:1915 births Category:1984 deaths Category:People from Chicago, Illinois Category:Loyola University Chicago alumni Category:Northwestern University alumni Category:Roosevelt University alumni Category:20th-century poets Category:20th-century women writers Category:African American female poets Category:American poets Category:American women writers Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:Women poets